Apologies to stolen children

As a parent of some years, I have found that I get very easily emotional hearing stories of children that have been harmed. Such a story was told in Rabbit-Proof Fence (2002) about Aboriginal children taken from the parents by the British. I don't know where the British arrogance and presumptuousness comes from, but for some reason they have always had it in spades.

I didn't know until today that the British have also been taking away British children from their parents and relocating them for forced labor up until 1967.

Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd has now apologized for these horrible deeds, and British PM Gordon Brown is planning to do the same. It's the very least they can do, so thank you for that.

It shouldn't be too much to ask that any organizations involved in these shameful tragedies apologize, especially since many of the children are still alive. Who else was involved, then?

In one case documented by the Senate, the mother of a boy being sent to Australia tried to remove him from a train and was forcibly restrained by nuns from a religious foundation involved in the migration program.

“The child migrant recalled how he thought he was going on a holiday and called out ‘will you be here when I come back, mum?’”, according to the report. “He stated that ‘these words still haunt my mum to this day, 50 years on.’” [Emphasis added.]

Can we expect whatever religious foundation the nuns belonged to to apologize? Let's hope so. The stories of these children are heartbreaking.

Like the British children sent to Australia and Canada, many of those who also arrived in New Zealand ended up in orphanages or foster care and were neglected and abused.

(..)

A total of 549 British children were sent to New Zealand between 1920 and 1967, often without their parents' consent.

Can you just imagine having your child taken from you and never hear of them again? *Shudder*

On October 6th, 1950, 10-year old twins, Brian Thomas and James Sullivan, arrive from London to Auckland. Apparently many of these children thought they were just going on a short vacation. Source.

Pleiotropy comes from the Greek πλείων pleion, meaning "more", and τρέπειν trepein, meaning "to turn, to convert". It designates the occurrence of a single gene affecting multiple traits, and is a hugely important concept in evolutionary biology.

I'm a postdoc at UC Santa Barbara.

All Many aspects of evolution interest me, but my research focus is currently on microbial evolution, adaptive radiation, speciation, fitness landscapes, epistasis, and the influence of genetic architecture on adaptation and speciation.